Countess Bathurst befriended Oliver Lomasney, a beggar she also took off the
streets and who, in the ensuing years, had “gone off the rails in
spectacular fashion”

A few years ago Countess Bathurst received a letter, scrawled on cheap prison notepaper and with a return address beginning HMP.

The name she knew all too well. Oliver Lomasney, the beggar whom she had befriended and taken off the streets and who, in the ensuing years, had “gone off the rails in spectacular fashion”.

Since her decision to give him a chance, the young man with the mud-spattered boots and an Alsatian named Ryan has blazed a destructive trail, leaving many women counting the cost.

Lady Bathurst and her husband, the ninth Earl of Bathurst, hit the headlines in order to find him a job, only for him to run off with Christine Hulbert, the 16–year–old daughter of a Cotswolds millionaire, and a pupil at the £12,000–a–year Cheltenham Ladies College.

Christine told her horrified parents she would rather be homeless than end the relationship, and the pair lived in a tent where she would while the hours away listening to him play his harmonica. Despite their cicumstances, Lomasney soon fathered a child with her, only to run off again, dumping her for another teenager.

He went on to marry Helen Carter, a dental nurse, but after their marriage collapsed he was twice convicted of brutally attacking her. Following the second assault in 2007, he was jailed for three and a half years.

While undergoing prison rehabilitation, he decided to write to his former benefactor. “The letter was very sweet,” Lady Bathurst now recalls. “He told me I had shown faith in him and he had completely abused that faith and he was very sorry for any hurt he had caused me.

“I did send a very brief reply, thanking him because I knew it would have taken him a long time to get the courage to write – especially to somebody whom he had let down. I told him I was very touched and wished him all the best in his recovery and future life.”

But this week, Lomasney’s long shadow was cast across the Cotswolds once more. The now 42-year-old was given a three-month jail term for launching into a vicious attack on his latest partner, punching her, grabbing her throat and waving a Stanley knife in her face, all while her terrified children, aged six to nine, were in the same house. In sentencing, the judge said that he was a “deeply unpleasant” man, and warned women to avoid him at all costs.

“The oddest thing,” says Lady Bathurst, “is just before I heard I had a passing thought of, 'whatever happened to old Oliver?’ Then a few days later I got a message from my personal assistant telling me the news.”

It has capped a difficult few weeks for the Bathursts. Last month Kim Roberts, a former housekeeper for Gloria, the Dowager Countess of Bathurst, the earl’s stepmother, appeared in court accused of stealing half a million pounds worth of antiques and art, including a Picasso sketch, from the Cirencester Park estate. She denied the charges and faces trial in November.

But as for the convicted criminal, Lomasney now appears a very different man from that fresh-faced 25-year-old whose picture appeared in the press after being befriended by Lady Bathurst all those years ago. He had arrived in Cirencester, near the Bathurst estate, after tramping across the country for months. He would beg outside Tesco, and Lady Bathurst would buy him beef sandwiches (turkey for his dog) as she passed.

If not quite charming, he was approachable and polite. “It was so rare in those days to see somebody homeless in Cirencester,” she says. “I thought there is something we must be able to do to help this young man. So I said to Richard, 'come on, let’s help him get a job and help him get sorted’.”

With an estimated fortune of £30 million, there was, of course, plenty they could do.

One of England’s oldest aristocratic families, the Bathursts originate from Sussex, where they owned Bathurst Castle until they were dispossessed of their lands by Edward IV in 1463, after siding with the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses.

A later ancestor was Sir Benjamin Bathurst, who was treasurer to James II before his accession to the throne, then treasurer to Princess Anne of Denmark, and cofferer to Queen Anne. It was he who purchased the current estate for his eldest son, Allen, who became the first Earl Bathurst in 1712.

But when it came to helping Lomasney, rather than simply offering him work on the family estate, Lady Bathurst ran an appeal in the local paper, asking for somebody to help.

The accompanying photograph; her in her Barbour jacket, he in filthy khaki trousers, proved irresistible to the press, prompting numerous “Lady and the Tramp” headlines. However she insists they were never close, and only ever met in the town square.

Following the appeal a local construction company obliged, but just weeks into his new life, Lomasney ran off with the Cheltenham schoolgirl a decade younger than himself.

“I did think, 'oh dear’,” Lady Bathurst admits. She didn’t know the girl’s father, a millionaire New York academic who had moved to the Cotswolds, but even so, when Lomasney telephoned her from their hideaway, she “read him the riot act”.

“I was forgiving but quite firm with him, as one would be with a slightly errant teenager. I told him to basically pull your finger out and stop letting the side down. I think I said to him, 'put yourself in the position of the poor girl’s father, and imagine what he is going through.’ ”

Lady Bathurst does not have any children of her own, but denies feeling any maternal instinct towards Lomasney. “No, never. I just don’t suffer fools gladly. I was incredibly frustrated somebody could let people down who tried to help him and was throwing away what could have been a perfectly useful law-abiding life.”

Nor, too, does she have any regret about extending a hand to the young man. “I’m genuinely sorry for the women he abused but I don’t blame myself for it in any way. I’m afraid that’s his make-up. There’s nothing I can do about that.

“But it does make you slightly warier of people. If all this has had any effect on me, it’s that.” Nonetheless, Lady Bathurst, remains patron and president of 12 charities, and still buys sandwiches for those down and out on the streets of Cirencester. One chilly morning a few weeks ago she pressed a warm pasty and a coffee into a young man’s grateful hands. Would another job offer be forthcoming? Don’t rule it out. “All you can do is stride forward with your best foot and hope to goodness the next person you try to help is not going to throw it all away with quite such staggering thoughtlessness.”

Even so, if another letter were to arrive at the Cirencester Park estate from Lomasney, the countess says she would read it, send a curt reply, and that would be that.

“I would not forget my manners,” she says, but admits she has long lost all hope of helping transform his life.